Fringe music reviews: Concerts of the Future | Anne Martin: An Tinne | Spatz Quartet + more

Concerts of the Future | Summerhall

Concerts of the Future ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 31 August

The likes of the blockbusting ABBA: Voyage show and the International Festival’s beanbag concerts have opened the door to a different type of concert experience. Concerts of the Future, though brief, is a different level of immersion.

If you have ever wondered what it might be like to play in an orchestra but don’t have the talent or the tenacity to make the grade, then this quirky half hour is for you.

This passive role-play for five “musicians” is a collaboration between House of Oz, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and The Sonicrats, a creative technology company dedicated to democratising the creation and performance of music - to such an extent here that a complete lack of musical nous is no impediment to getting stuck in.

Though if our halting party of five can make it into the MSO, surely anyone can.

Our guides to orchestral enlightenment are a trio of polite, quietly enthusiastic technicians in lab coats. By simply answering a couple of questions, some straightforward, one more abstract, each audience member - sorry, performer - receives a custom instrument with bespoke arcane names. Some look like space age sculptural woodwind, others are gourd-like percussive oddities which could have been conceived to play at the Cantina in Star Wars.

Following a brief workshop it is on to the “concert hall”. The instruments may be real but the performing environment is virtual, placing each player in the heart of the orchestra for the ten glorious minutes of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No.7, chosen not just because it is a doozie of the art (arguably not improved by the addition of some digital bells and whistles) but a nod to its cutting edge composer’s propensity to push instruments to their limits.

For participants, it is simply a fun chunk of wish fulfillment. Fiona Shepherd

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Anne Martin: An Tinne ★★★★

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 15 August

Anne Martin, renowned singer and storyteller, steeped in the Gaelic culture of her native township of Linicro on Skye, walks on stage, perches on a high stool, and begins to narrate, in story and (largely) Gaelic song, the story of a family cleared in 1875 from the nearby, long ruined township of Greaulainn, taking with them very little but including an slabhraidh, a cooking pot hook and chain which is still kept by their descendants in Victoria and which becomes the link – an tinne – that connects people and places, displacement and heartbreak, a world apart.

Against a monochrome backdrop of photographs, including the stark ruins of Greaulainn, and occasional video, Martin gives poised delivery to Gaelic work songs, and recounts how, when singing at a festival in Victoria, she met a descendant of the emigrant Skye family, who told her how they still possessed the chain.

Her style is assuming, but delivers bitter truths and denunciations: how in the mid-19th century rent increases of some 300 per cent and clearance encouraged population decline, so the pot chain ended up in Geelong, Victoria.

However, the Gaels’ forced emigration to the Antipodes brought chains of a different stripe, and with less than homely associations. Backdrop black and white photographs document indigenous Australians, manacled callously together, as Martin recites a litany of grim statistics.

Between 1843 and 1854 the indigenous population of Tasmania dropped from 800 to 126 within a decade, under new masters from Skye, who treated them as less than human, while Australia’s surviving indigenous people were not deemed valid enough to be counted in a census until 1971 – clearances a world part linked by chains of hardship, persecution and, yes, passing the pain on. Jim Gilchrist

READ MORE: EIF Contemporary Music highlights:: Jim Gilchrist on the 2026 programme

Spatz Quartet: About Legends & Legacies ★★★★

Valvona & Crolla (Venue 67) until 29 August

For those of us of a certain age, the prospect of an Eagles or Sting hit re-imagined by an essentially jazz-based quartet may have prompted a degree of apprehension.

As vocalist Roy Mac’s acoustic guitar opened the Spatz Quartet’s set with the familiar chords of Hotel California, however, joined by the rounded tones of Malcolm MacFarlane’s electric guitar, plus Tom Gordon’s drumming and the melancholy Balkan whine of Walt Smith’s clarinet, it became clear that they could capture the essential spirit of the song – even as the lyrics morphed into an unashamed pean to V&C’s renowned cavern of comestibles downstairs.

Unsolicited commercials apart, the Quartet – all seasoned players in their own right – had an inventive way with a song, while duly crediting the artists who had inspired their covers. California Dreaming, for instance, by the Mamas and the Papas via Diana Krall came over well, clarinet keenly echoing the original’s flute break.

Romping through the 20th century, they brought a serious shuffle to a love song from the original version of Fiddler on the Roof, Smith’s clarinet taking on a klezmer whine, and enhanced the bluesyness of Georgia on My Mind, Mac’s singing, and the band’s approach in general, treating these classics with respect and affection.

London By Night was somewhat on the somnolent side, rather than the atmospheric nocturne made famous by Sinatra, and Mac’s tongue-in-cheek acapella adaptation, Auld Reekie By Night, was a bit laboured.

All in all, though, theirs was an intriguing playlist, ranging from Sting’s Shape of My heart, coloured by MacFarlane’s skeletal Frameworks guitar and Smith’s almost vocal-sounding clarinet, to Mac taking up a 12-string which had once belonged to Gerry Rafferty for a beefy take on Stealer’s Wheel’s Stuck in the Middle with You. Jim Gilchrist

The Breakup Variety Hour ★★★

Studio Four at Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 31 August

There are many ways to process a break up – and in Edinburgh in August, a one-woman show is definitely one of them.

Written and performed by New Yorker Ariana and the Rose, The Break Up Variety Hour unfolds like an old school cabaret for the anxiously attached, complete with original songs and charming stage patter that dissect the different stages of romantic grief.

These stages, as per the show, number six, and Ariana leads us through each chapter of her recent heartbreak with vivacious charm, from the mania of the immediate aftermath (“you can do anything with bleach blonde hair other than look stable”) to the possibility of falling in love again.

This is very much a show of the post-Crazy Ex-Girlfriend era – confessional, manic and ironic. The Break Up Variety Hour uses the structure of a variety night to point to the messy and contradictory process of moving on.

The tone just about straddles the line between irreverent and earnest, yet despite a promise of heartbreak razzle dazzle at the start, the show’s musical numbers feel a little too contained. While more glamour and subversion would be welcome, Ariana’s gung ho energy and sweet sincerity make for an enjoyable hour. Anahit Behrooz

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